Predators
by Kia Vail-Kagami
Summary: Raziel gets a first look at the spectral realm after getting temporarily killed in battle.


The pain reached its height and faded. Getting back to his feet, Raziel looked around and had no doubt where he was.

The city looked more alien than he had imagined it would. The walls of the buildings had shifted, creating odd angles. Pillars and towers had twisted, formed into something no human or vampire would have any desire to build.

The sky was gone. It was the only way he could think of to describe it. The dark field of the night sky had been taken away and replaces by nothing. There were no clouds, no stars, nothing for the eye to hold on to. The light came from nowhere.

The torches on the walls were still burning, but their fire had turned blue and insubstantial. They provided no actual illumination, nor did they need to.

Their flickering flames were the only movement but for him. All the vampires and humans fighting in this street had disappeared along with the sky and all colours. This world was empty. It _felt_ empty. There was no sound, no wind – Raziel wasn't even convinced there was air. Nothing lived here.

Nothing was meant to.

Looking down, the vampire half-expected to see his own body lying on the ground, but there was nothing. It didn't surprise him, really – even that would have seemed out of place.

He didn't feel out of place at all. It had, he was certain, something to do with him currently being dead.

Raziel had not been here before, but he had heard about it. Vampires were hard to destroy, after all. Even if they died, they could be revived if their wounds got a chance to heal. It happened every once in a while, in battle or even during training, that vampires found themselves impaled through the heart, and once the weapon impaling them was removed they would come back, and tell of this place.

The Land of the Death, some called it, while some settled for the shorter name of Hell. It was the emptiness, the infinity of loneliness pressing down from all around that shook them, and some returned insane. Some didn't return at all. There were predators, they said, obscure, alien creatures that feasted on the souls of the dead. Some had seen them and escaped. Others had been freed from the weapons that killed them and remained dead.

There were no predators here. Raziel looked up and down the distorted street where the battle was still going on a world away and listed to the silence. He didn't feel like he was going mad anytime soon.

In fact, he felt almost at home, and certainly safer than he should. He'd been, he had to admit, curious about this place.

Perhaps this curiosity had made him careless in battle, inviting the blow that killed him. No, that wasn't true. No one could accuse Kain's first lieutenant not to be dedicated to every fight he fought. But he had to take risks to take out the leader of the human army. Jumping behind their defences from above had the desired results, but the remaining, now leaderless humans outnumbered him by a large number, and Dumah, strong as he was, had been too slow to follow.

It had been a calculated risk, but as he felt for his chest in remembered pain, Raziel couldn't help but feel angry at himself. He could he resurrected, sure, but as long as he was dead he couldn't fight. And as long as he was here, he had no way of knowing what happened to his body, or any influence on it.

The humans were losing the battle. They would be too busy fighting for their lives to bother with an enemy that had already fallen. It was, in the end, Dumah Raziel worried about most. His younger brother was ambitious to say the least. If he considered himself unobserved, he might well take the opportunity to throw Raziel's body into the moat and move one step closer to the top of Kain's raising empire.

Kain was another problem to worry about, albeit a distant one. There was precious little hope that his Lord wouldn't learn about his – hopefully temporal – demise, and certainly he would mention Raziel's failure in battle quite a few times in quite pointed ways. He might even get sarcastic. Rolling his eyes in premature exasperation, Raziel sighed, vaguely surprised that he had breath to do it.

A distant noise caught his attention. The dead air left the sound as distorted as the rest of this place, but once he had determined the direction of the noise – tripling footsteps, something hard scratching over stone – Raziel started towards it, moving as quietly as he could in this world that offered no shadows to hide in.

The sounds quickly came closer, and then they stopped. Raziel, about to turn around a corner, stopped as well. He didn't breathe. Just out of sight, he felt, was something listening just like he was, sensing his presence. If these were the predators he had heard of, he was about to meet them.

While his clothes remained, his sword, he'd found, was gone from his hand. It didn't matter – he needed no weapon to kill. Whatever was waiting for him around that corner didn't scare him.

So he gave up his careful approach and broke into a run, ready to become the attacker rather than the attacked. But when he reached the corner and could look at the place behind, all he could see were shadows of creatures disappearing into the gloom. What movement he caught a glimpse of was hurried, without structure. Raziel had seen it often enough.

They were fleeing from him.

How odd.

Intrigued, Raziel wanted to follow them, get a better look at least, but something stopped him. He shouldn't get any further. He _couldn't_. Every step he took was harder than the one before.

It was no physical barrier stopping him, but the sense that he shouldn't get any further away from the place where he entered this realm. Instantly, he understood why: this was where his body was, a world away. He was bound to this place by the dread that came with leaving it behind.

At least his body hadn't been destroyed yet. Surely he would have been free to move if it was.

He should stay close to it, for the moment he could return. Raziel walked back the way he had come, and the creatures followed him. He could sense them, just out of sight, curious but never daring to stay where he could see them.

It unsettled him more than an attack would have, even when something tugged at his soul and the world faded away to be replaced by searing pain and a body that was far too real.

June 09, 2009


End file.
